Gravity's Rainbow Summary: Pynchon's Rocket, the War and the Zone
What Gravity's Rainbow is about
Thomas Pynchon published Gravity's Rainbow in 1973. It is set mainly in Europe at the close of the Second World War, and its subject is the V-2 rocket: how the German military designed it, built it and fired it, and what the weapon does to the people who chase it. At the centre of the book sits a mystery object, the Schwarzgerät (German for 'black device'), which is due to be fitted into a rocket carrying the serial number 00000. Several characters spend the novel trying to find out what that device is.
The story opens in wartime London with Pirate Prentice of the Special Operations Executive, who is taken to the site of a V-2 strike. Meanwhile an American officer, Lieutenant Tyrone Slothrop, becomes an object of study for a secret psychological warfare outfit called PISCES, based in a former asylum nicknamed 'The White Visitation'. Slothrop has been keeping a map of his sexual encounters across London. Someone notices that each marked location is followed, days later, by a rocket falling on the same spot.
That coincidence drives the first part of the book. The Pavlovian psychologist Edward Pointsman believes there must be a causal link between Slothrop's erections and the missile strikes. The statistician Roger Mexico argues it is chance, the kind of pattern a Poisson distribution throws up. Their disagreement widens into the novel's real argument: whether events are caused or merely scattered. Pointsman grows more interested still when he learns that as a baby Slothrop was the subject of behavioural experiments run by a Dr Laszlo Jamf. In the second part, Slothrop is moved to a casino on the newly liberated French Riviera, watched the whole time by Pointsman's people.
The book is huge and deliberately unruly. Around 400 named characters pass through it, most of them appearing once. The narrative moves across the occupied zones of post-war Europe, back into colonial New England history, and off into dreams, hallucinations, songs and digressions. Plot summary only gets a reader so far with it.
The main characters
Tyrone Slothrop is the closest thing to a protagonist, an American intelligence officer whose body appears to predict rocket strikes, and whose family history in the Berkshire Mountains of western Massachusetts is traced back to colonial times and a Puritan legacy of sterility and decline. Edward Pointsman is the behaviourist who wants a clean cause and effect. Roger Mexico is the statistician who sees probability instead, and who fears losing his girlfriend Jessica Swanlake to her duller alternative, Jeremy.
Katje Borgesius is a Dutch double agent who infiltrated a V-2 launching battery and later falls under Pointsman's control. The battery was commanded by Captain Blicero, an SS officer whose name carries a Teutonic sense of death, and who kept Katje and a young soldier, Gottfried, as sex slaves in a twisted version of Hansel and Gretel. Blicero is also Lieutenant Weissman ('White Man'), a figure who had already appeared in Pynchon's first novel, V. He has a severed relationship with Enzian, a Herero man he brought to Germany from German South West Africa, now Namibia. Enzian leads the Schwarzkommando, a group of Herero rocket technicians. Franz Pökler, a German engineer who worked on the V-2, and his wife Leni, a former student radical, are introduced early and matter more later.
The themes
War is the setting, but power is the subject: who builds the weapon, who profits, who is used as material. The rocket itself is treated as an object of desire, almost erotic, and the book keeps turning over cause, chance, determinism and the occult, including the idea of time running backwards. Colonial violence runs underneath it, carried by Blicero's history in South West Africa and by the Herero technicians now serving the rocket that was meant to serve Europe. Science appears as both an achievement and a machine for control, from Jamf's conditioning of an infant to Pointsman's surveillance of a grown man.
Why it still matters
Gravity's Rainbow shared the 1974 US National Book Award for Fiction with Isaac Bashevis Singer's A Crown of Feathers and Other Stories. The Pulitzer fiction jury chose it for 1974, but the advisory board objected to the content, calling it in parts unreadable, turgid, overwritten and obscene. No Pulitzer for fiction was awarded that year. It was also nominated for the 1973 Nebula Award for Best Novel.
Time later placed it among its All-Time 100 Greatest Novels, covering English-language fiction from 1923 to 2005, and many critics rank it among the greatest American novels. It is the standard example of the encyclopedic novel, and featured in Edward Mendelson's essay Encyclopedic Narrative: From Dante to Pynchon, which coined the term. It suits readers who want difficulty on purpose, who enjoy dense allusion and comic names, and who are willing to let a book resist them. Readers who want a clean line from beginning to end will find it hard going, and that is by design.
